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About

Public discourse on the Balkans is often passionate, but rarely well informed. Stereotypes and anecdotes dominate, rather than hard data. While deep local knowledge exists on the state of the Balkans, its peoples, and its frontier regions, it is not easily available to the public, nor is it presented in a visual format to aid identification of positive trends or emerging challenges. Social scientists and hard scientists alike lack mechanisms for empowering citizen scientists with intuitive direct access to their Balkan research, for learning and for sharing those lessons.

Local and international stakeholders alike would better know the true condition of the Balkans, and better place this region's changing context over time if publicly available quantitative and qualitative comparative data were collected, compiled, and presented on-line via accessible, interactive, sharable visualizations.

This Balkans data portal pools public data and builds on data engines to generate embeddable data visualizations, is equipped with tools for registered users to upload new data sets and to create visual data displays, and matches all this with highlighted reporting from data journalists in Balkan communities.

Ultimately, our aim is to empower citizens with the tools to learn and share more about their own community and to place their community into the context of intuitively similar and dissimilar places nationally and across borders.